The Book of Knots - Jags

the three dimensions of reality (the three sides of the Tetrahedron that are
‘up’ if you go and look at one). The fourth side, which was ‘down’, was
time—and there were no Caretakers for time … well, there were—but
they did something different—and that’s where our aside comes in.
The Caretakers, in the formative stages of universal four-space had jobs
holding the walls up … which they did (even while Wonderland, where
they lived, was seething to get in). They were ultimately arrogant and
highly self-assured and having an important job to do suited them well,
they thought. They were important self-sustaining-information-patterns,
after all.
The Fourth House, so to speak, automated their duties (which were
considerably more mathematically complicated than the first three) and
created something known as The Department of Works (we’re almost
done here, I promise, then you can go to sleep).
Where the caretakers could not comprehend the concepts of infinity and
zero (they had words for them, but to fully understand them requires
… well … math.), the fourth house had to handle all the Quantum
Dynamics and Relativity Mechanics and all that stuff which is (as you
know, if you got past high school physics), like, math-central.
When the Fourth House was done with the Department of Works (which
is, taken together, a thing of great beauty), the patterns in the Fourth
House stopped self-sustaining and sublimated
into the infinite.
The Caretakers, however, had no such plans.
None at all. They began their great lives by
making many lesser lives with which to be vastly
superior too. It was good to be the Caretakers,
looking every now and then at the universe
getting cooler—and clumpier—and darker—and
more … volumetric.
And then, as you may know, something went
dreadfully, horribly wrong. It was like having
someone piss on your Picasso. It was like finding
a worm in your apple with two dung-covered
worm-hands curled into tight-fisted wormmiddle-fingers
poking up at you from the bite you
just took, knowing that the rump half of the worm
is in your mouth and the worm has, well, a certain
kind of worm-grin on its worm-face that I won’t
go into here.
It was like that—but a bajillion times worse.
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Book of Knots - The Caretakers